Culinary Adventures! (Part One)

Our status is currently: students living on a budget. So the following are some simple meals we've prepared at home.This is a picture of the beef stew I made. Credit goes to http://www.videojug.com
Potatoes, carrots, beef, tomato puree, leftover port wine, butter, chicken stock. After simmering for 2.5 hours. This is what you get! Delicious and comforting on a cold day.
Here is our Mexican styled Popiah. haha.. the tortilla! Easy to make. bought minced beef, and spice mix. Pan-fry with onions. Serve on tortilla with lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, red pepper, cucumber and lots of taco sauce. Great for a no frills lunch!

On one particular day, I was fretting over what to cook for dinner. I had some very precious beansprouts from malmo china town and it won't last long. I also had cold fresh chicken in the fridge. What could I possibly make out of this? Didnt take long for the lightbulb to illuminate: Chicken rice! So i compared many chicken rice recipes on the internet, and found a suitable one for the ingredients I had in the fridge. Here is the final product:

First I took about 5 cloves of garlic and sliced some ginger, spring onions and boiled it in a chicken stock. Rub the chicken with salt, and added it to the stock. Boil for 5 mins. Turn off the fire and let it sit for 25 mins. After that I plunge each chicken part into cold water for about 30 seconds, and served with some chicken soup, soy sauce and sesame oil, arranging it on this plate with cucumbers and tomatoes. Didn't take any pictures of the rice. But I pre-fried the uncooked grains first with oil , garlic and ginger before transferring it to the rice cooker to cook with the chicken soup from the chicken. haha and it worked! The rice tasted somewhat oily like the ones you get in the hawker centres!

And here is the last of our precious beansprouts:
Panfried with carrots and oyster sauce. It was quite delicious!

On another afternoon, I chanced upon a salmon offer in ICA, the supermarket we usually go to. 89crowns for 1kg of salmon! (thats about 20+SGD) for 1 kg. Usually its 159crowns per kg. So I hurriedly got 600g of salmon about (11SGD) which can last me and the boy for 2 meals. And here is what became of one part of it: Teriyaki salmon.


Because it was so fresh, I merely panfry it with a little olive oil and some garlic, before adding teriyaki sauce. You can see its quite pink in the centre. And thats how I like it. Slightly undercooked! The accompaniment to the fresh salmon is what else, every student's favourite meal: Pasta. (cos its cheap and easy to cook)

The sauce here in the pasta is made quite simply by frying garlic and onions, adding mushrooms, and usually, capsicium (but I forgot to buy) and euroshopper pasta sauce for 9.90crowns about $2+SGD. Can be used for the 2 of us for 4 pasta meals. Or one pasta meal and one huge lasagne.

And our favourite is:
Haha! Pig Liver's Mee Sua. For some reason, our caretaker here does not provide as with many bowls. Lots of plates, but not bowls. Think maybe Westerners don't really use bowls, cos they drink soup from a soup plate. So we have to use these plates as well for soup. The tur qua here is really cheap. A fresh piece of pig's liver from the supermarket costs about 9 crowns. $2+SGD, and can last the 2 of us for 2 meals. so thats 4 plates of tur qua mee sua. Our guess is that the people here don't really know what to do with it. On many occasions, when I was slicing tur qua in the kitchen (an activity which I really enjoy, cos I love the feel of the soft liver), many corridor mates have come to ask me what that was. What I told them, pig's liver. They usually do a double take. hahaha.

Then there's sweet and sour pork:
Heh. I was really enthusiastic about making the sauce for this myself. But, as it turns out, a quick check on sweet and sour pork recipes on the internet will show that you need rice wine to make the sauce. We went to system bolaget (a state monopoly in Sweden for alcohols) to find that the only Asian wine they stock is Sake. Oh well, so the sweet and sour sauce is from a bottled sauce bought from the supermarket. Still, it serves us well and taste quite authentic. Thanks to my family who sent corn flour from singapore, I could fry the pieces of pork first. (though i'm no good at frying, can't guage when the oil is hot enough, or when its too hot) and then fry the condiments, a generous helping of onions, green peppers, and garlic with the pork in the oh-so-delicious sauce. Very appetizing!

There is one dessert we've made several times: Italian panna cotta.

The Italian "panna cotta" literally means cooked cream. And the recipe is courtesy of www.videojug.com. Vincent really loves this dessert. It requires simmering cream with milk, and sugar. After which, we will add about 100g of dark chocolate into the mixture to melt, whisking together to blend. Then adding 3.5 gelatin sheets, before refrigerating overnight. This is one of the favourites with our guests.

Then there are the frequent dinners with others when we will each cook something and share, and partake in a big feast!

And the steamed egg in the middle of the setup was cooked by me! recipe courtesy of the spoletorp south singaporeans.

A big feast shared in the midst of hearty conversation! Company is always the best appetizer!
More coming up! Thai green curry! Chicken paprika! Baked fish! Lasagne!

By the way, we can sympathise with you when we read about the rising price of rice in singapore. Be assured its worse here. A 2kg bag of rice here can set us back by about 6SGD, and thats only for 2kg at the cheapest supermarket.